Hello. My name is Tom Dillon and I am a tofuholic. Yes, I fork down tofu by the saucerload. I slice it and dice it into salads and dump it wholesale into sukiyaki. I spear it up from the misty depths of my miso soup and snarf the deep-fried variety like candy. When I raid the fridge late at night and find a tofu tub quivering in fear behind jars of jam and wrappings of "chikuwa," I offer no mercy.

Here's a fun fact to sweeten your life: The average Japanese consumes about 1.1 kg of chocolate per year. Meanwhile, your typical American gobbles down five times that amount -- which is still nothing compared to the 10 kg snarfed away by your average Swiss or German. The sugary hook on the modest Japanese figure is this: Sixty percent of the total consumption centers around one specific day. And what day is that?

One benefit of wedding into a Japanese family is the discovery that there is much more to Japanese cuisine than just sushi and tempura.

Most Japanese serve rice at every meal and feel a meal is incomplete without it. Many also assume that Westerners think the same about bread